Our house is on fire. Join the resistance: Do no harm/take no shit. My idiosyncratic and confluent bricolage of progressive politics, the collaborative commons, next generation cognitive neuroscience, American pragmatism, de/reconstruction, dynamic systems, embodied realism, postmetaphysics, psychodynamics, aesthetics. It ain't much but it's not nothing.

Friday, October 12, 2012

12 scientific studies on liberal/conservative differences

This ain't just an oppositional equivalency. Some evolution is involved!
I know, regressives don't accept evolution. There you have it. From this source:

In the 12 peer-reviewed scientific studies summarized below,
researchers found that liberals and conservatives have different brain
structures, different physiological responses to stimuli, and activate
different neural mechanisms when confronted with similar situations.
Each entry below references the source document and a PDF of each study
has been included. The studies are arranged from most recent to oldest.

1. Conservatives spend more time looking at unpleasant images, and liberals spend more time looking at pleasant images."We
report evidence that individual-level variation in people's
physiological and attentional responses to aversive and appetitive
stimuli are correlated with broad political orientations. Specifically,
we find that greater orientation to aversive stimuli tends to be
associated with right-of-centre and greater orientation to appetitive
(pleasing) stimuli with left-of-centre political inclinations."

"...[P]olitical conservatism is promoted when people rely on
low-effort thinking. When effortful, deliberate responding is disrupted
or disengaged, thought processes become quick and efficient; these
conditions promote conservative ideology… low-effort thought might
promote political conservatism because its concepts are easier to
process, and processing fluency increases attitude endorsement.

Four studies support our assertion that low-effort thinking promotes
political conservatism... Our findings suggest that conservative ways
of thinking are basic, normal, and perhaps natural."

3. Conservatives react more strongly than liberals to disgusting images, such as a picture of someone eating worms.

"People
who believe they would be bothered by a range of hypothetical
disgusting situations display an increased likelihood of displaying
right-of-center rather than left-of-center political orientations…
In this article, we demonstrate that individuals with marked
involuntary physiological responses to disgusting images [measured by
change in mean skin conductance], such as of a man eating a large
mouthful of writhing worms, are more likely to self-identify as
conservative and, especially, to oppose gay marriage than are
individuals with more muted physiological responses to the same images."

4.
Liberals have more tolerance to uncertainty (bigger anterior cingulate
cortex), and conservatives have more sensitivity to fear (bigger right
amygdala).

"In a large sample of young adults, we related self-reported
political attitudes to gray matter volume using structural MRI [magnetic
resonance imaging]. We found that greater liberalism was associated
with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex,
whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the
right amygdala...
...[O]ur findings are consistent with the proposal that political
orientation is associated with psychological processes for managing fear
and uncertainty. The amygdala has many functions, including fear
processing. Individuals with a larger amygdala are more sensitive to
fear, which, taken together with our findings, might suggest the
testable hypothesis that individuals with larger amagdala are more
inclined to integrate conservative views into their belief systems...
our finding of an association between anterior cingulate cortex [ACC]
may be linked with tolerance to uncertainty. One of the functions of the
anterior cingulate cortex is to monitor uncertainty and conflicts. Thus
it is conceivable that individuals with a larger ACC have a higher
capacity to tolerate uncertainty and conflicts, allowing them to accept
more liberal views."

5. Conservatives have stronger motivations than liberals to preserve purity and cleanliness.

"...[R]eminders
of physical purity influence specific moral judgments regarding
behaviors in the sexual domain as well as broad political attitudes...

...[E]nvironmental reminders of physical cleanliness shifted
participants’ attitudes toward the conservative end of the political
spectrum and altered their specific attitudes toward various moral
acts... When taken together, these two sets of results point to the
possibility that political orientation may be, in some measure, shaped
by the strength of an individual’s motivation to avoid physical
contamination and that resulting vigilance for threats to purity may
serve to reinforce a politically conservative stance toward the world."

6.Liberals follow the direction of eye movements better than conservatives.

"In the present study, we examine whether gaze cue effects [the
ability to follow the direction of another individual’s eye movements or
gaze] are moderated by political temperament, given that those on the
political right tend to be more supportive of individualism—and less
likely to be influenced by others—than those on the left. We find
standard gaze cuing effects across all subjects, but systematic
differences in these effects by political temperament. Liberals exhibit a
very large gaze cuing effect while conservatives show no such effect at
various SOAs [stimulus onset asynchrony]...
Perhaps conservatives are less likely to trust others meaning that they are also less likely to trust a gaze cue..."

7.
Republicans are more likely than Democrats to interpret faces as
threatening and expressing dominant emotions, while Democrats show
greater emotional distress and lower life satisfaction."Independent
sample t-tests revealed group differences in the averaged threat
interpretation scores of the 10 facial stimuli. Republican sympathizers
were more likely to interpret the faces as signaling a threatening
expression as compared to Democrat sympathizers. Group differences were
also found for dominance perceptions, whereby Republican sympathizers
were more likely to perceive the faces as expressing dominant emotions
than were Democrat sympathizers...

Collectively, when compared to Republican sympathizers, Democrat
sympathizers showed greater psychological distress, more frequent
histories of adverse life events such as interpersonal victimization
experiences, fewer and less satisfying relationships, and lower
perceptions of the trustworthiness of peers and intimate affiliates."

8. Genetics influence political attitudes during early adulthood and beyond.

"The
present research attempts to characterize how the transmission of
political orientations develops over the life course... [G]enetic
influences on political attitudes are absent prior to young adulthood.
During childhood and adolescence, individual differences in political
attitudes are accounted for by a variety of environmental influences...
However, at the point of early adulthood (in the early 20s), for those
who left their parental home, there is evidence of a sizeable genetic
influence on political attitudes which remains stable throughout adult
life."

9.
Compared to liberals, conservatives are less open to new experiences
and learn better from negative stimuli than positive stimuli.

"In this study, the relations among political ideology,
exploratory behavior, and the formation of attitudes toward novel
stimuli were explored. Participants played a computer game that required
learning whether these stimuli produced positive or negative outcomes.
Learning was dependent on participants’ decisions to sample novel
stimuli... Political ideology correlated with exploration during the
game, with conservatives sampling fewer targets than liberals. Moreover,
more conservative individuals exhibited a stronger learning asymmetry,
such that they learned negative stimuli better than positive... Relative
to liberals, politically conservative individuals pursued a more
avoidant strategy to the game…

The reluctance to explore that characterizes more politically
conservative individuals may protect them from experiencing negative
situations, for they are likely to restrict approach to known
positives."

10.Conservatives tend to have a stronger reaction to threatening noises and images than liberals."In
a group of 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs,
individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden
noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign
aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control, whereas
individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to
those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital
punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War. Thus, the degree to which
individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate
the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing
social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal
(norm-violator) threats."

11. Liberals are more open-minded and creative whereas conservatives are more orderly and better organized.

"We obtained consistent and converging evidence that personality
differences between liberals and conservatives are robust, replicable,
and behaviorally significant, especially with respect to social (vs.
economic) dimensions of ideology. In general, liberals are more
open-minded, creative, curious, and novelty seeking, whereas
conservatives are more orderly, conventional, and better organized... A
special advantage of our final two studies is that they show personality
differences between liberals and conservatives not only on self-report
trait measures but also on unobtrusive, nonverbal measures of
interaction style and behavioral residue.”

12.
When faced with a conflict, liberals are more likely than conservatives
to alter their habitual response when cues indicate it is necessary."Our
results are consistent with the view that political orientation, in
part, reflects individual differences in the functioning of a general
mechanism related to cognitive control and self-regulation. Stronger
conservatism (versus liberalism) was associated with less neurocognitive
sensitivity to response conflicts. At the behavioral level,
conservatives were also more likely to make errors of commission.
Although a liberal orientation was associated with better performance on
the response-inhibition task examined here, conservatives would
presumably perform better on tasks in which a more fixed response style
is optimal."